Neohelicon XXXIV (2007) 2, 1322

DOI: 10.1007/s11059-007-2002-x

J. HILLIS MILLER

A DEFENSE OF LITERATURE AND LITERARY STUDY

IN A TIME OF GLOBALIZATION AND
THE NEW TELE-TECHNOLOGIES

Present-day globalization means many different kinds of change. It is, moreover, happening at different rates in different places around the world. All globalizations forms, however, depend on new tele-technologies like email and the Internet. Among cultural features being transformed is literature. This is so both because literature has a more and
more subordinate role, around the world, in relation to film, television, computer games,
cellphone messages, blogs, and videos, and also because the rapidity of literatures translation and diffusion has brought into existence Goethes and Marx/Engels dream of a
world literature. New technologies have also transformed the conditions of literary
study by making so much literature and so many aids to literary study available online.
Nevertheless, as a close look at Wallace Stevenss The River of River in Connecticut
shows, literature, in the sense of printed novels, poems, and plays, still remains one of the
premier ways to create virtual realities. Literature also uses language in subtle and complex ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to match in other media.

Marx and Engels, in a famous and quite remarkable paragraph in Chapter One of the
Communist Manifesto, foresaw what today we call globalization, both as economic
mondialisation, to give it its French name, and as cultural world-wide-ification.
I am thinking of the section in the Manifesto that begins with the claim that:
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that
is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the
entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of
Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it
stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death
J. Hillis Miller, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of California at
Irvine, CA 92697 USA. E-mail: jhmiller@uci.edu
03244652/$20.00
2007 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest

Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest

Springer, Dordrecht

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J. HILLIS MILLER

question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. 1

This paragraph of the Manifesto ends with these prophetic sentences: In place of
old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common
property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature (ibid.). World literature, Weltliteratur the word and the idea are Goethes.
Though Marx did not foresee the iPod, he did understand what changes technological
innovation make. Today he would be speaking not of world literature, but of an apparently homogenous worldwide culture of the new media: television, films, popular
music, the internet, email, podcasts, videos, computer games, digital photos sent by
email, and so on.
I have elsewhere emphasized that present-day globalization has three fundamental
features: 1) Globalization is happening at different rates and in different ways in different countries and regions. 2) Globalization is heterogeneous, not one single happening. Several quite different forms of globalization are going on at the same time.
Economic globalization is not the same thing as cultural globalization. Neither of
these is the same thing as the globalization of technology, nor is the environmental
degradation that is causing what is called global warming quite the same as any of
these. 3) The common denominator of all these forms of globalization is new
tele-techno-communication. Though Marx and Engels understood the way technology was already in 1848 changing the world and making globalization inevitable,
they did not, of course, foresee radio, television, the cell phone, nor even the telephone and the gramophone. It is these forms of technology, the ones that make possible many new forms of communication at a distance, that have made globalization
hyperbolic in scope and rapidity.
Marx and Engels saw the globalization of capitalism as both a catastrophe and an
opportunity. It would be a catastrophe for the old European nation states because it
would weaken their hegemonies. That weakening Marx and Engels more or less welcomed. Globalization would also mean, they foresaw, the victory of capitalism as a
world-wide single economic system of exploitation, commodification, and commodity fetishism. That they deplored. They also saw global capitalism, however, as the
chance for communism, through the death of capitalism when it inevitably overreaches itself through a process of autoimmune self-destruction. The workers will rebel to usher in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx and Engels, you will remember, do not appeal to the workers of this or that nation to organize within that country
and resist. They say, Working men [sic!] of all countries, unite! If Marx and Engels
1

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

A DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

15

prophesied the globalization of capitalism, communism, as defined in the Manifesto,

was itself explicitly a form of globalization. In this it was like Christianity, from
which our conception of the world as a unified totality is derived. Marx and Engels
also saw that both forms of globalization, economic and cultural, involve the weakening of nation state hegemonies and of national cultures, for better or for worse.
What possible role can there be for literary study in a time of cinema, television,
the internet, podcasts, globally distributed popular music, computer games, and
blogs? Literature would seem to be already a thing of the past, as Hegel said art was.
Literary study would therefore seem to be no more than a species of antiquarianism.
Or rather, it might be better to say that literature has moved from being the primary
medium of virtual realities to being just one among many available purveyors of the
imaginary, the spectral, the ghostly, the magical, the illusory. Literature now takes its
place alongside cinema, television, the Internet, computer games, popular music, and
iPods as another form of teletechnocommunications. Jacques Derrida calls them
artefactualities.2
What do I mean by saying that literature is a medium, like the new media, for the
communication of virtual realities? I mean that when I read a printed novel or a poem
the words on the page provide me access, if I am an adept reader, to a realm of people
in a setting and in their interaction that seems like the real world, that is, like the material world around me that I can see, smell, and touch, but that is available only, and
exclusively, by way of those words on the page. In a similar way, television news
looks like it is giving me direct access to events more or less as they are happening,
but television images are elaborately filtered and reshaped, cut and pasted to produce a constituted pseudo-reality, a technologically manufactured realm of spooks
and shadows that dance on the television screen. That, I suppose, is what Derrida
means by calling television a purveyor of artefactualities. The images provided not
only by the new media, but also by old ones like literature are apparent facts that are in
fact artifacts. A computer game is quite obviously a virtual reality. Even a popular
song has an implicit story. The song generates the sense of an imaginary situation in
which someone might say or sing what the words of the song say or sing.
Why have these new media, in a way parallel to the success of the print novel when
it first appeared in the late seventeenth century in Europe, had such an immediate appeal? Why did a million and a half Chinese pay good money to subscribe to the Chinese version of the computer game, World of Warcraft, when it came out in the summer of 2005? Now over three million Chinese play World of Warcraft.3 Why this instant success? I answer that human beings seem to need virtual realities. We take insatiable pleasure in artefactualities. Human beings need fictions. They take to them as a
duck takes to water, in whatever form they are most readily available. These new me2
3

Here is one among many places where Derrida uses this neologism: Jacques Derrida, On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 301.
See the story in the New York Times for Sept. 5, 2006: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/
09/05/technology/05wow. Of the global success of World of Warcraft (WOW), one can only say,
Wow!

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J. HILLIS MILLER

dia purvey virtual realities in ways that are relatively easy to translate, transfer, or
adapt all over the world, whereas printed literature is more tied to one natural language, to local idioms, and to local cultural conventions. A popular song can be successful, popular, even in countries where the language is not understood. My formula, the knowing reader will note, significantly alters Aristotles formulation in the
Poetics. Aristotle said human beings take pleasure in imitation, mimesis, because they
learn from imitations. The referential basis of imitation is retained by Aristotle and is
essential for him. I say, on the contrary, that human beings need fictions that are not
directly mimetic of anything. Such artefactualities create a new world presupposing
the momentary displacement, forgetting, or even abolition of the real world.
Two more things have happened to literature as a result of globalizing technologies, in addition to its relegation to the status of being just one among many ways to
enter virtual realities. One is the globalization of literature, as Marx foresaw. Any national literature anywhere in the world, both those in dominant countries and those
in subordinate countries (though that distinction is breaking down), exist now for
many or most readers in the context of all the other literatures in all the other languages. This happens partly through the extreme rapidity and diffusion of translations
these days, partly through the global diffusion of certain languages, most obviously
English. Literature in English is one form globalization is taking. British literature,
like American literature, is just one segment of world literature in English. It seems
increasingly foolish to study either British or American literature in isolation.
The second change in literature as a result of globalizing technologies is the radical
transformation of literary study. As I have said in another paper, globalization of the
new teletechnologies has meant the transformation of literary scholarship and the
weakening of the necessity to do it in a university setting. Anyone anywhere now with
a computer can have access to an enormous distributed database of scholarly information and online texts. These allow authoritative research in almost anything. It is becoming less and less necessary to own or to have access to that traditional basis of research and teaching in the humanities: lots of printed books, a research library. It is
not necessary, for example, to own hard copies, as they are called, of Henry Jamess
novels. They are almost all available online for free. I have cited in this paper the
Communist Manifesto from one among several online versions I obtained in a few
seconds by way of Google. Collaborative scholarship can be carried on by teams that
are made up of individuals spread all over the world, not just located in a single university. I was in 20052006 involved in an ambitious international research project on
narratology. It was ostensibly located at the Center for Advanced Study in Oslo,
though I spent a total of only three weeks there during the year. Research essays are
written on a computer and sent anywhere in the world instantaneously as email attachments. I write all my letters of recommendation in the computer and send many of
them by email. Dissertation chapters are sent to me by email. I am learning to read, annotate, and comment on them on the computer screen. The whole minute to minute
process of my professional life as a student of literature has been utterly changed by
the computer in a few short years.

A DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

17

Though I have found it difficult to put my finger on how literature in the sense of
printed poems and novels is changed by being put within the context of globalizing
teletechnocommunications, more and more absorbed within it, digitized, as we say,
like everything else, my strong feeling is that the change is fundamental. One important change is the ability to search so easily online versions of literary works. Another
is the subjective sense the reader of online versions has that the work now exists in
cyberspace, not in multiple copies of a book on library shelves. The digitizing of literature is the preparation for literatures disappearance in the form we have known it in
the brief period of the printed books dominance as the chief cultural medium. This
period began in the late seventeenth-century in the West, the time of the rise of modern democracies, more or less universal literacy, and the more or less complete freedom to write or say whatever you like, never completely achieved anywhere, of
course.
All honor to those scholars who have turned to so-called cultural studies and to
studies of the new media. Those new media are enormously influential all over the
world these days. It is natural that academics should want to study them, their contexts, and their influences. I want now, in conclusion, however, to defend literature
and literary study in the fast-disappearing old-fashioned sense of printed books. I
want to praise literary study in a time of globalization and new digitized media, often
media that center on visual images rather than on written words. I want also to express
my allegiance to so-called modernist literature in Europe and America. That segment of literature has especially, among other things, brought the essence of literature, what it is and what it can do, out into the open or at least into shadowy semi-visibility. I want, finally, to come clean and to admit that I believe literature can say
things and do things that cannot be done, or that are almost impossible to do, in the
newer media. Those things go against these new medias grain. They are nevertheless
of great value, perhaps even indispensable, irreplaceable, value, even though we may
well soon have dispensed with literature without the world or human civilization
coming to an end.
Just what are those things that only printed literature can do or do best? A comparison between canonical novels and even the best films made from these novels, such as
recent British films or television productions of novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and E. M.
Forster, will give one answer. As carefully as these films follow the novels, as brilliant
as they often are as cinema, they find it virtually impossible to carry over into the new
medium one essential feature of printed novels. I mean the ironic doubling of the
characters language by the narrators language in what is called free indirect discourse. As numerous scholars have shown, free indirect discourse, narrative language that repeats the characters putative present tense internal language in the third
person past tense, is fundamentally undecidable. It is impossible to tell for sure
whether we are reading the characters own language or the narrators language. Two
things follow from this: 1) A gift for irony is a necessity for good reading of printed
literature in a way that is not the case, or not so much the case, for playing computer
games, appreciating a popular song, or watching a film. 2) Printed literature, even the

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J. HILLIS MILLER

simplest and most straightforward of written fictive sentences, hides a secret.4 As

Derrida puts this in Passions, speaking of his passion for literature, il y a l du secret,
there is some secret there. Literatures secret can never be revealed or brought into the
open. It remains hidden behind the appearances that tell of it. This secret is not a matter of the greater verbal or figural complexity that is often mistakenly thought to be a
distinctive characteristic of literary language. Such complexity is a feature of written
language generally, for example in the puns in newspaper headlines: Airline Profits
Head for Nosedive.
The secret that there is in literature is revealed and hidden in the simplest literary
sentence. Franz Kafka said he became a writer when he substituted er for ich, he for I.
The early parts of one of his masterpieces, Das Schlo, The Castle, were first written
in the first person and then rewritten in the third person, thereby enigmatically doubling the represented consciousness in the way I have said free indirect discourse
does. In a remarkable statement, Kafka said, When I write without calculation a sentence like the following: He looked out the window, this sentence is already perfect.5 By perfect, as the context makes clear, Kafka meant that the full perfection
of all literature can do is already present in such a sentence, since it creates magically
a virtual or fictive world. The initial paragraph of Kafkas first great story, Das
Urteil, The Judgment, the story that confirmed for him his gifts as a writer, culminates in such a sentence: Er ... sah dann, den Ellbogen auf den Schreibtisch gesttzt,
aus dem fenster auf den Flu, die Brcke und die Anhhen am anderen Ufer mit ihrem
schwachen Grn.6 (He looked then, his elbows planted on the table, out the window
toward the river, the bridge, and the high ground on the other shore with its tender
green.) A diary entry describes the writing of this story, which took place all during
one night, as both the total destruction by fire of the real world, and the simultaneous creation, in a Phoenix-like resurrection brought about performatively by the
words he set down or inscribed one by one on the page, of a unique, alternative literary world, a virtual reality. Kafka also defines the act of writing as lifting oneself by
ones bootstraps, as the saying goes. Writing is an impossible carrying oneself on
ones own back. He asserts also that everything can be said, that is, that everything
whatsoever can be turned into literature: The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. Several times during this night I
heaved my own weight on my back. How everything can be said, how for everything,
for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up
again.7
A famous sentence in Mallarms Crise de vers (Crisis of Verse) says something similar in a different, distinctively Mallarman, idiom, this time in terms of po4
5
6
7

Jacques Derrida, Passions, Paris: Galile, 1993, 5671.

Cited in Maurice Blanchot, Kafka et la littrature, De Kafka Kafka, Paris: Gallimard, 1981,
81, my translation.
Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung und Andere Erzhlungen, Kln: Knemann, 1955, 35.
Franz Kafka, The Diaries: 19101922, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh and Martin
Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken, n.d., 212213.

A DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

19

etic speaking rather than writing: Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de loubli o ma voix
relgue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose dautre que les calices sus,
musicalement se lve, ide mme et suave, labsente de tous bouquets.8 (I say, a
flower! and, outside the forgetting to which my voice relegates every contour, as
something other than the known calyxes, musically there rises, suave idea itself, the
something absent from all bouquets.) Mallarms formulation is embedded in the local idiom of his time and place. Mallarm was fond of fancy words, especially words
in x, such as calyx or, in French, calice, from Latin calyx, which means the
outer protective covering of a flower. Musically has as its context the primacy of
rhythm in Mallarms poetics and the fin de sicle notion that all the arts aspire to the
condition of music. Mallarms word idea has Hegelian resonances, as in Hegels
definition of the beautiful, in the Lectures on Aesthetics, as das sinnliche Scheinen
der Idee, the sensible shining forth, or appearance, of the idea. That figure of shining
reappears in the poem by Wallace Stevens I discuss below. Nevertheless, in spite of
these singularities, Mallarm is saying something similar to what Kafka said. The
simplest language, He looked out of the window, or a flower, is the abolition not
only of the object it names, but also of the whole material world to which it appears to
refer, and of which windows and flowers are familiar parts. At the same time, such
language is the performative creation of a fictive world that reveals and hides what
Jacques Derrida calls le tout autre,9 the wholly other, named by Mallarm here as
idea, a word crucial for Wallace Stevens too, as when, in Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction, he exhorts the ephebe, or novice, to see the sun again with an ignorant
eye/And see it clearly in the idea of it. 10
I conclude by demonstrating, in a sketch or hypotyposis, how the simplicity of literary language indicates, without revealing, a secret, something wholly other. My example is the next to the last poem in Wallace Stevens Collected Poems. It is a poem
written in the poets old age, when he lived in the shadow of death. Death is named in
the poem by way of references to the River Styx of Greek mythology. Stevens calls
the realm of the dead Stygia. The poem is called The River of Rivers in Connecticut. This poem is rooted in local idiom, in local culture, and in local topography near
the city of Hartford, where Stevens lived. The name Connecticut, according to
Wikipedia, comes from the Mohegan Indian word Quinnehtukqut meaning Long
River Place or Beside the Long Tidal River. Stevens title appears, at least at first,
to refer to the Connecticut River, one of Americas great rivers. That river bisects the
state of Connecticut, a small New England state on the eastern coast of the United
States. The poem names two towns near the Connecticut River, Farmington and
Haddam. Both towns have beautiful late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century
white-painted clapboard homes, churches, and civic buildings, in a serenely decorous
8
9
10

Stphane Mallarm, Crise de vers, Oeuvres compltes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry,
ed. de la Pliade, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, 368, my translation.
Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, Paris: Galile, 1999, 114117.
ll. 56 of It Must Be Abstract, the first section of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, in
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage, 1990, 380.

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J. HILLIS MILLER

and harmonious style called Greek Revival. That style is one of the great triumphs
of American architecture.
A careful reading of the poem indicates, however, that the river of rivers in Connecticut names not the Connecticut River, but an invisible ubiquitous river, neither
transcendent nor immanent, definitely not an idealist transcendental, not an idea in
the Platonic sense, but a river that flows nowhere, like the sea. The river of rivers in
Connecticut is a curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction. It flows (curriculum)
and it has power (vigor), but it is as much local as Haddam or Farmington. This
river is Stevenss version of Mallarms ide; Kafkas Gesetz, law, as in his
parable, Vor dem Gesetz, Before the Law, in Der Proze, The Trial; or Derridas
tout autre, wholly other; or Derridas untellable secret, if there is one, as he says.
It would be a mistake to think of this wholly other as one single monolithic or even
monotheistic transcendent nameless something. If every other is wholly other,
then each encounter-without-encounter of it is singular, unique, a local abstraction.
Every wholly other is, by definition, wholly different from every other wholly other,
as well as wholly different from me. The wholly other must be thought of as a swarming plurality, not a oneness, an Einheit. As Derrida says in the last sentence of
Psych: Invention de lautre, Lautre appelle venir et cela narrive qu plusieurs
voix.11 (The other calls to come [or, calls the future] and that does not happen [or arrive] except in multiple voices.)
I have said Stevenss title names this strange river. The word names is important, since it indicates that what the poem talks about is not really a river. The poet
only calls it a river, in a performative catachresis that gives a name to the nameless secret that the scenery of the poem everywhere tells of without making visible. The
poem depends on distinctions between seeing, naming, and telling. The river of rivers
in Connecticut is not to be seen beneath the appearances that tell of it (my italics).
The poet, in his answer or response to this telling, that is, in his poem, cannot directly
name or refer to this river, since it is incompatible with referential language. It is an
unnamed flowing. The poet can only call it something that is not literally what it is.
The poet can only, call it, again and again,/The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.
This calling is more a performative invocation than a referential naming, even a
catachrestic one.
Here is the poem:
The River of Rivers in Connecticut
There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.
In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,
11

Jacques Derrida, Psych: Inventions de l'autre, Paris: Galile, 1987, 61, my translation.

A DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

21

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,

Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.
It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening, and Haddam shines and sways.
It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction ...
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,
Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea. 12

Call it, again and again,/The river that flows nowhere, like a sea. The river of
rivers is not really the name of this secret something in Connecticut. That is just
what the poet calls it. It is actually an unnamed flowing, but even flowing is a
word borrowed from the name for what real rivers do. No language can name this
river of rivers, except by indirection, though indirection is not an adequate word for
this performative response to the unnamable.
This beautiful and moving poem calls forth endless commentary, for example the
provocative phrase about trees that lack the intelligence of trees. This wonderful
phrase does not mean that trees are smart. It rather transfers our knowledge of trees,
this side of Stygia, to the trees themselves. When we get to those black cataracts of
Stygia, the realm of death, we shall forget all human knowledge. The river Stevens
calls out to, however, is far this side of Stygia. This is a poem about life under the
sunlight in Connecticut, not about the realm of death. No shadow walks beside this
river, such as the shadows that walk on Stygias banks. Stevenss river is not black
with death and lack of intelligence. Its mere flowing, rather, is full of a
gayety,/flashing and flashing in the sun. Something could be said at length about every word and phrase in this poem, for example about the admirable lines that show a
revelation-without-revelation through shining and glistening, even though the river
of rivers is not to be seen beneath the appearances that tell of it: The steeple at
Farmington/Stands glistening, and Haddam shines and sways.
As Jacques Derrida has abundantly shown, for example, this connection without
connection of literature with the wholly other has crucial implications for the ethical
and political functioning of literature.13 Can the newer magical media film, television, computer games, popular music, and so on, do anything with words or other
12
13

Collected Poems, 533.

See, for example, La littrature au secret: Une filiation impossible, the second essay in the
French version of Donner la mort, 159209. This important essay has been translated into English by Adam Kotsko and circulated here and there by email, but has not, so far as I know, yet
been published in printed form.

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J. HILLIS MILLER

signs comparable to what Stevens so effortlessly does with the printed word? Perhaps,
but with great difficulty, and in ways that are hardly noticeable, or at any rate that are
not noticed by most of the scholars who write about the new media. For most of them,
other means the racial, national, linguistic, ethnic, or gender other, not Derridas
tout autre. It sounds absurd to claim that the computer game World of Warcraft
keeps a secret, in the sense that Derrida means secret, though it might be worth trying to demonstrate that this is the case. I conclude therefore that what we call written
literature has an almost unique and irreplaceable performative function in human culture, even in a time of globalization and the increasing dominance of new
teletechnologicoprestidigitizing media.